Random Ramblings

Amazon.com has launched a service called "The Mechanical Turk" ... a reference to an old chess-playing "robot" that was actually a hidden person (from Turkey, presumably). Anyway, there are some tasks that are easier for humans to do than computers such as pattern recognition in images -- e.g. reading a word on a billboard in a photo, or the name of a band on an image of an album cover. See http://mturk.com or http://amazon.com/mturk/

They'll pay you around $0.03 for each album cover image you view and identify. I'm not sure of the details, but one article I saw suggested you could make maybe $3.60 an hour. That's not even minimum wage, but if you have a job like a receptionist (with lots of down-time), that could get some you Xmas cash!!